Joanne Chianello: Councillors are not a-mews-ed

You can never tell what’s going to spur a two-hour debate at council. Indeed, with this supposedly conformist council, you’d be forgiven for assuming virtually nothing could.

But on Wednesday, two council rarities: our elected officials discussed a procedural issue for about two hours; and that debate ended in a vote against Mayor Jim Watson’s position, only the second time that’s happened during this term of council.

And what was this dramatic issue that absorbed council for an unprecedented amount of time? A motion to amend the minutes of the April 24 council meeting.

The convoluted backstory isn’t easy to summarize, but here it goes.

The controversial planning strategy for the Preston-Carling area calls for a mews, or kind of alleyway, that runs north-south along the O-Train tracks. The mews would connect a number of dead-end streets that are slated for nine-storey-plus buildings.

The community doesn’t like a number of things in this plan, including the mews, which it fears will bring more car traffic into the area. Developers — and Taggart in particular — aren’t wild about the mews either, in part because they’d have to give up land to build it.

So a couple of months back, FoTenn — consultants working for the developers — asked Coun. Rainer Bloess to submit a number of motions for consideration by the planning department with regards to the entire Preston-Carling strategy. One of the motions was to do away with the mews connecting Adeline to Beech Street.

That motion circulated around the planning department for a few weeks, according to Bloess. Eventually on April 24, council approved the motion to erase any mention of that mews from the planning strategy.

It was a close and contentious vote. Coun. Peter Clark put council on notice that he was going to bring the issue back for reconsideration at the May 8 meeting, but then didn’t for some reason not yet known.

So that seemed the end of that. No mews, for better or worse.

Not so fast.

It seems there was a technical-slash-legal-slash-inside-baseball error that no one caught until very recently. Although council did vote to take the mews out of the planning strategy document, councillors also voted in favour of a recommendation that city staff further study the idea of a mews. That recommendation — which was never erased by the original motion — was erroneously removed from the official minutes of the April 24 council meeting, according to the city solicitor, and needed to be put back in.

Confused?

Of course you are! And so were councillors, who only found out about the error at 6 p.m. Tuesday, the night before the council meeting. And in the morning, they found a competing legal opinion from Taggart’s lawyer in their email inboxes.

Coun. Keith Egli very reasonably argued for a deferral so that councillors could try to get their heads around the complex issue. After all, the issue is about amending old council meeting minutes — hardly an emergency that needed to be decided on the spot.

We should be pleased that councillors are so interested in the ramifications of one of their decisions. Last time they voted yea without enough information, we ended up with a bid for a casino.

But that’s not how Watson saw it. He suggested that all a two-week delay would accomplish would be to give developers time to lobby councillors. The deferral motion failed.

Later, the mayor told reporters he found it “frustrating that our clerk comes to us and admits he made an error in the document, and we’re simply being asked to change the minutes to reflect what exactly happened at city council, and it turns into a two-hour procedural debate.”

It’s obvious there’s nothing simple about this issue and someone as smart as Watson must surely know that. Councillors believed that back in April they had voted to get rid of the mews. But by reinstating the recommendation for staff to study the mews leaves open the possibility that the alleyway could be put back into the plans.

Some saw the move as subverting the will of council. Others were angered by not being given enough time to get their heads around the issue. Certainly, there’s been growing grumbling in the halls by some councillors over Watson’s penchant for pushing through motions, like the recent move to put a two-per-cent cap on 2014 taxes that was walked onto the council agenda earlier this month.

Whatever the motivation, 14 councillors voted against “fixing” the minutes versus eight in favour. (Tellingly, many of Watson’s usual supporters, including both deputy mayors, didn’t vote with the mayor.) Watson was not amused. He even suggested that councillors who voted “nay” had been lobbied by a developer.

How councillors could have been lobbied on a motion they only laid eyes on 19 hours earlier is difficult to fathom. However, the mayor’s office confirmed that Taggart’s in-house lobbyist, Ted Phillips, met with a member of the mayor’s staff on April 26, and missed the deadline for registering the meeting. (Phillips admitted he has been remiss in not registering the meeting, but not for lack of trying — he lost his security password and has been trying to secure a new one, a fact city staff confirmed independently.)

So it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what is giving this crazy debate legs. Is it the fact that the motion showed up at the last minute (yet again)? Or is it the seeming inflexibility of the mayor that is fuelling this issue? Then there’s the mayor’s insinuation that lobbyists have had undue influence on councillors. How much truth is there to that assertion? Maybe it’s an all-of-the-above sort of situation. But to echo Egli, “It’s not about the mews.”

We’ll have a couple of weeks to figure out what the whole thing really is about. Because after the Watson-supported motion to amend the minutes failed, council voted to reconsider the issue at the next council meeting. This mews story isn’t over yet.

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